form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 27is excluded by Kivy’s argument. The mixture of elation and sadness
evoked by music can be more intense than all but the most devastating
negative and positive emotions directed towards external non-musical
events. Kivy’s position makes it just too hard to understand the depth
and complexity of affective investment in art. It is trivially true, for
example, that music can ‘express’ everyday emotions. However, it is
actually very hard to give the word ‘express’ a really productive sense.
Adorno says of the term expression that ‘where it was used for the
longest time and the most emphatically, namely technically, as a musi-
cal marking, it does not demand that something specific, particular
psychological states (‘seelische Inhalte’) be expressed. Otherwise expres-
sivo would be replaceable by the names for the particular thing to be
expressed’ (Adorno 1997 : 7 , 160 ). In Kivy’s case what is expressed
would be ‘garden variety’ emotions, and what Adorno is pointing to
would be lost. Making Kivy’s idea of emotion the dominant focus of the
relationship between music and its recipients does little to account for
the intensity that can go into the development and reception of new
forms of expression in the history of music. The scenario, suggested by
Kivy’s approach, of listening to the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth and
thinking ‘That sounds pretty sad, but it has nothing to do with the real
sadness that I felt when my partner left’, because the music just possesses
the ‘perceived property’ of being pretty sad, really does not get to the
heart of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth. Something is obviously
missing.
Mahler’s symphonies inaugurate new dimensions of musical possi-
bility which absorb, articulate, and evoke other dimensions of emotion
from their historical context besides ‘garden variety’ sadness (on this,
see chapter 9 below). Furthermore, his symphonies can give rise to
new kinds of feeling in their listeners. Think of the moments of barely
controlled panic in the Sixth Symphony in a world that will turn out
to be spiralling towards the First World War, or the symphonies’ sense
of saying an ironic but melancholy farewell to forms of music which
can no longer be naively employed in the face of the way the world is
moving. We need an approach that allows us to appreciate the depth
and complexity involved in important music as a cultural phenomenon,
not one whose main aim is to settle the philosophical problem it sets
itself by limiting the scope of the issue in the hope of making it more
tractable. Music is world-disclosive: the world itself can take on new
aspects because of it, and an adequate approach to music must be able
to respond to this.